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Slarti

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Posts posted by Slarti

  1. 12 hours ago, Lorn said:

    Does it have the same system, where, according to your level, you get a bonus or malus on xp?

     

    Yes.  Question for you:

     

    Most RPGs have a system where XP isn't adjusted for level.  Instead, the amount of XP you need to get a level up changes dramatically as your levels go higher.

     

    In practice, these systems end up having almost the same effect.  It's true that 10 experience doesn't get rounded down to 0 if you now need 50,000 experience to get a level up, but getting 1/5,000 of a level up is never going to be meaningful anyway.

     

    Do you have just as much of a problem with this more common system?  In which case you're essentially arguing for something like "every complete zone gets you the equivalent of 1 level up, regardless of what level you're at"?  Or are you objecting more to the feeling of getting 0 experience, even though in practice it might not be any different from getting the full amount, but having massively scaled up XP total requirements?

  2. I think there's a fine line here.

     

    Ignoring cultural context wholesale is, indeed, ridiculous.  But art can (and, many creators would say, should) be viewed from perspectives different from that of the author.

     

    Sometimes new perspectives make us appreciate the work on new levels and in new ways.  Other times, they don't -- or they might expose gaps in its applicability, or make its insights feel shallower, or etc.

     

    When something like that happens, it doesn't ruin or delete other perspectives on the work at all.  But at the same time, it is a data point.  Because there are amazing works of art where you just end up with more and more connections, more and more meaning, every time you look at it differently.  And then there are works of art that might be beautiful from one perspective, but don't have that expansive, transcendent aspect -- or have less of it.

  3. What people hate about the boats isn't the progression, or the dividing up into chapters.  G4 did the exact same thing, it just didn't use boats.

     

    What people hate about the boats is the massive waste of time and of the user's attention -- it takes like 3+ minutes to go back to ANY previous island zone for any reason -- that's time where the player has to be paying attention to click on different things -- and then another 3+ minutes to return.  And if you want to go back two or more islands -- ugh, forget it.

     

    It was especially weird because Jeff had previously written blog posts criticizing this kind of thing -- "sandwich time" he called it.

     

    Conceptually, the boats are fine.  In terms of organizing content, they are fine.  It's as a user experience that they were a gaping debacle.

  4. Well, turns out Tolkien gave us an actual answer:

    https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Samwise_Gamgee

     

    Tolkienists regard Sam as Frodo's batman. In the British Army, a batman was an orderly who acted as the personal servant of an officer. It was a role with which Tolkien (who served as an Army officer in the First World War) would have been extremely familiar. Sam undertakes all of the typical roles of a batman — he runs errands for Frodo, cooks, transports him (or at least carries him), and carries his luggage. Tolkien confirmed this interpretation when he wrote in a private letter that:

    My Sam Gamgee is indeed a reflection of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself
    The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

  5. To me it reads less like "master/servant" and more like a pretty positive version of "knight/squire" or -- to take a reference more relevant to Tolkien -- "corporal/private."  There's a layer of very unequal decision making, but it seems pretty separate from the way they treat each other as persons.  The age difference (50 vs 38, with coming-of-age at 33) also seems relevant -- easy to imagine an organic power dynamic just from differences in real-world experience.  Imagine a 21yo and a 28yo.

     

    You can read it as Sam being unfairly submissive -- but Sam seems to have pretty sharp instincts about who it is and isn't wise to defer to; Frodo never treats him poorly; and he has no problem acting on his own when forced to.  The level of humility isn't for everyone, I guess, but in Tolkien's world at least the positive practical impact is clear -- both on those Sam helps, and on what he ultimately receives (less Ring-temptation than literally anyone else who encounters it in its whole history; and set of personal relationships back in the Shire that is both extensive and deep).

  6. The person is definitely sitting.  It's extremely clear.  You can see the side of the robe going horizontally across the seat and then dropping off where their knees are.

     

    There's nothing about this image that is specific to Alwan, and numerous things that conflict with his portrayal in G5.  Yes, it's always possible the artist was inspired by something that final image bears no resemblance to.  Yes, every discrepancy could be artistic license.  There's simply nothing to suggest that happened here.

  7. It's not Alwan.  First off, let's look at the FULL image, not a cropped version:

     

    https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/geneforge/images/a/a2/GF5splash.jpg

    https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/geneforge/images/a/a2/GF5splash.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/1000?cb=20110223111244

     

    That's not Alwan's support frame, that's a fancy throne.  There are no shaped conduits going into the thighs or arm of the person sitting there.  G5 clearly states Alwan has those.  It also states: "He can never sit."

     

    G5 also has multiple pictures of Alwan in his support frame, and those differ from this chair in numerous ways, even just looking at the device itself.  Many of the points raised above apply as well (attack timing, robes vs armor, the hand magic swirl sure looks like battle magic and not shaping, etc etc).

  8. This thread hasn't been posted in in 7 years.

     

    MC Tugger, friendly mod request since this has come up a few times now.  For ancient threads like these, it's OK to post in them if you have something new to add, but please let them remain inactive if it's just "me too" or "the links that were dead 7 years ago are still dead".  Thanks! 🙂

  9. Hi friend!

     

    Recognized you immediately from your custom title (#thanksdrakey).  You didn't post all the time, but when you did, it was usually something thoughtful and insightful.  You were definitely one of the (many) people who made this such a lovely place.

     

    Nice to see you here again, and hope you're doing well.

  10. I ran an all-mage party on Torment in A2:CS and had none of the issues with the Garzahd fight that Randomizer is describing.  I don't know why he experienced those.  (Maybe you tried that during the beta, and Jeff made changes afterwards?)  But this does seem to be an issue that nobody else ever brings up...

     

    2 hours ago, Randomizer said:

    As I said there are monsters that have 95% resistance or armor against damage type.

    No, there really aren't any cases where this is a thing in the way stated, i.e., impeding an all-one-type party, at least in the first two games.  Resistances show up very little in the defs files, it's almost all just the automatic per-level resists, and where they do show up, it's exclusively stuff like fire lizards where they resist or block one magical element.  That won't slow down a mage party at all.

     

    Please, point me to any enemy that has 95% resistance against all three primary magic attack types (magic, fire, and ice) but not to physical damage (and that isn't a "gimmick" enemy easily conquered in some other trivial way).  There aren't any!

     

    2 hours ago, Randomizer said:

    The other demon fights in there are tedious, but able even at 5% to hit chance with Demonslayer.

    20% is the minimum hit change in A2:CS, not 5%.

     

    2 hours ago, JAJ28 said:

    Would you say that the same comments you hold true for the original trilogy as well?

    Mostly, no.  The original trilogy has substantially different mechanics and game balance.

  11. 4 hours ago, Randomizer said:

    It's harder to do an all fighter or all magic party... It's isn't impossible. but this considered a challenge party.

     

    I emphatically disagree with the above, as far as all-mage parties in A:EFTP and A2:CS go.  An all-mage party isn't a challenge party, it's an easy button.

     

    In theory everything Randomizer says makes intuitive sense, but the mechanics don't show up that way.  The reality is that "extremely high resistance or armor" basically never comes up in a way would block a build entirely (i.e., either for physical damage, or for all magical elements -- since casters have access to all of them).  Instead, the trilogy relies on blanket level-based resistance scaling that favors magic elements significantly by the end of the game.

     

    For that, among a number of other reasons, magic is incredibly strong.  You can run an all-mage party and never look back, and the games will likely be easier than with a standard "1 of each" party.  This is particularly true in A2:CS.  (You can still have one mage who can hit accurately with Demonslayer for that area, or you can just ignore it and blast away.  This issue is overstated and does not force use of a warrior.)

     

    A:EFTP is also easy with an all-mage party, though the theoretical "best" party there is probably 3 casters and 1 warrior.  (The difference is due to a combination of factors, including some minor nerfs to dual wielding and the loss of certain OP weapons from the first game.)

  12. Haha, the chitrach infestation was bad.  I was actually referring to the graphics, though: on original release, A4 used Geneforge's clawbug graphic for chitrachs.  This was a pretty wild shift from how chitrachs had been depicted in previous games.  There were some other borrowings -- hellhounds that used roamer graphics IIRC -- but that one was the most conspicuous.

     

    This was fixed within a month or two (which may have been before the PC release altogether).  I remember somebody on the forums producing an improved graphic, but I don't remember if Spiderweb used that or something else.

  13. A4 truly is just as gated as A5.  Even the Great Cave, while a larger area than earlier ones, is still gated.  Personally A4 felt more gated than A5, because while in A5 the gates at least make sense geographically, in A4 they are blatantly obvious inserted progression limits.

     

    We may be having different experiences here because A4 was your first game.  Since it took place in the same area as A1 and A2, but with a dramatically weirdly condensed map (this cannot be overstated), this made the gates really stick out -- since A1 and A2 were (with the obvious exception of Dark Waters) classic open world exploration games.

     

    A1, A2, and A3 all have the "game never ends" feature.

     

    The narrative around A4's development has shifted to be a bit less dramatic than it once was, but basically, Spiderweb had just sunk an unusual amount of time into an ambitious game (BoA) that, though it eventually did well enough, didn't receive as warm a reception, on release, as previous Spiderweb games.  So there was a deliberate lean towards "what will lots of players out there like."  This led to some very nice technical/mechanics improvements like quest boards and inventory windows (people forget this), but it also a loss of balance/variety (see also: G3) and a feeling that the existing game world was being ignored (especially because of the map, "the vahnatai did it", and the treatment of many NPCs, major and minor; the chitrach/clawbug fiasco didn't help).

     

    Personally, I enjoyed A4 despite all of these things.  I probably do see it as a low point, but a low point for Spiderweb games is still better than a lot of what's out there.

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